Beanbioca As Good As It Gets

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Anoushka Slater While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Dana An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

harvbenn "President's Analyst" distills 60's culture, popular ("total sound") and hippie (the promiscuous "Snow White" handing out LSD) and urban neurotic (urgency of couch psychiatry). Not to leave out the Cold War co-dependence, even camaraderie of the Soviet and U.S. spy agencies and the struggle of the smaller players (even Canada!) to make the big scene. It exposes and satirizes the FBI-CIA schism and then there's unseen but pervasive corporate dominance over both. Don't forget academic myopia {"I need to write a paper for the Institute on this")and racism (wounds of being called a "nigger" in childhood). Never heard of this James Coburn, Godfrey Cambridge gem? This film is still too hot to handle for most film lists and libraries. One of the very best!

MisterWhiplash Theodore J. Flickner should get some credit after the fact: The President's Analyst is nothing if not original, for its time anyway. Take the topic of analysis, of the psychological profession, and put it to use in a political satire on the Cold War and the period of total paranoia. And casting James Coburn was a wise choice as he's an untapped source of comic potential (sometimes with just a smile or grin with those big pearly whites of his), often in subtle bits of acting and facial movements. But it's unfortunately not quite as successful as it could've been; the potential here is wide and great in skewering, for example, LBJ and his plunging-America-into-Vietnam administration. While the filmmaker does go after the paranoid aspects pretty well- and does something almost half-clever in not ever showing the president let alone his analyst sessions- at some point it veers off into strange and dated territory.For the latter, I mean the stuff involving the phone company. Maybe things were different with those times of the phone company acting like total wastes of space, but nowadays its hard to relate to that skewering, particularly if you didn't live in that time period. It's still kind of interesting with the robots attached to the wall as scary bureaucrats, but one would rather see either the wacky on-the-run theatrics of Coburn's character (i.e. following the Mr. Feeney actor on his way to Seaside heights) or the oddly subtle scenes like with the Russian spy on the ship or even those Roger Corman-style exploitation scenes with the hippies (one of them, with the assassins killing each other off in the grassy fields, is the maybe the funniest scene in the movie).So it's worth seeing, but it's more of a 'rental' kind of thing than rushing out to buy or seeing on a re-release at an art-house. It is, up to a point, like how one critic described it as "Philip K. Dick meets MAD magazine", but that being said it's only with so-so PKD and MAD.

Bob O`Bob This just may be the best movie ever made about "The Phone Company", and now, in 2006, it is perhaps more important than ever. Back in 1967 it was a fantasy and a comedy, but today in the real news (and more importantly, in people's billing statements) it's more of a tragedy.Okay, fine - so that's really a topical 2006 joking interpretation, but I always felt this was a comedy classic, and I really do think it might do 2006 society a little good to have a laugh, and then give a thought about what, it seems, might be happening all over again. The prophetic view of everyone, everywhere, being connected wirelessly has now almost happened. Can we really be sure the evil parts aren't happening too?It's silly, it's imaginative to the point of fantastical (for 1967 anyway) and now it's practically topical all over again.

gridsleep Mix science fiction, adventure, conspiracy, politics, counterculture, violence, sex, rock'n'roll, computers, androids, hippies, drugs, and the Phone Company. Bake for two hours in a hot air-conditioned theater. Result: Instant cyberpunk. William Gibson can't hold a candle to this gem. The only other film that even comes close is the original Casino Royale. One of my top ten favorite films. Look closely, does everyone you know carry a cell phone? Do you feel freaked now? You'd better. Mwaa haa haaaa. Thank you for using the Phone Company. Seriously, this film was so far ahead of its time, it's still ahead of its time. Had it not been made as a comedic satire, it would have been banned by the Johnson Administration. This is the perfect anti-industrial declaration. But it isn't all back-to-nature, which gets a serious poke in the ribs as well. No sacred calves in this picture, except maybe life and the love of it. It's all a joke, really, as Arthur said in Zardoz (another great gem -- or maybe it wasn't Arthur.) Really, get this film by hook or by crook (nudge nudge, wink wink, be seeing you 6.) Watch it, learn it. It is t3h l33t. Before Akira, before Mona Lisa Overdrive, before The Shockwave Rider, there was The President's Analyst. Ignore this film at your peril.